Annie had the presence of mind to grab her kettle before she spun and ran back into the wagon. The water sloshing inside was only half-warm, but that would have to do; even if the wendigo had returned, God forbid and keep them all, Adeline needed her medicine. The girl was doing surprisingly well for how long she had been without, barefoot and running through the trees like the chill did nothing to distress her. It wouldn’t last.
(There had been a time, brief but real, when Annie had considered abandoning Adeline’s medicine. All the girl’s troubles were a consequence of her father’s science: How could science heal science? It seemed better to let nature intervene. Nature’s intervention had consisted of Adeline’s lungs filling with fluid while her senses departed her, replaced by wild thrashing and nightmares she lacked the physical dexterity to express. The medicine Annie gave her daughter daily was a necessary treatment for the damage Michael had done. Not a cure, no—cures were the stuff of fairy tales—but a treatment that allowed the child to have the closest thing she could ever know to a normal life.)
The others were on their feet when Annie crashed back into the wagon, all save for Adeline, who was sitting cross-legged on her bed, watching the door with huge, dark eyes.
She relaxed when her mother closed the door, and signed, ‘It’s not the hungry ones.’
“What’s that?” Annie grabbed a mug with her free hand, tossing it to Adeline. “Measure your herbs.”
Adeline let the cup drop to the cover, keeping her hands free. ‘It’s not the hungry ones, or my friends. This is people.’
“What’s she saying?” asked Mr. Blackstone, moving to the wagon’s small window and twitching the curtain aside, peering out into the dark. He shook his head. “I can’t see a thing. I need to be out there. Sophia, Soleil, Annie, you stay here.”
“She’s saying that whatever is attacking is neither wolf nor wendigo, but something human.” Annie looked to Hal. “Is there another settlement near here?”
“No.” He shook his head. “The Clearing survives alone. We’ve had a few other villages try to establish themselves, but the wendigo are always waiting, and always hungry. Nothing has been able to take root in this poisoned soil.”
Martin grabbed his rifle, kissed Sophia on the temple, and started for the door. “I have to help. I didn’t defend the show against the wendigo. Whatever this is, I have to help.”
“No, you have to stay here and care for the woman who will be your wife,” said Annie. Adeline dropped a handful of herbs into the cup. Annie poured a stream of lukewarm water over them, creating a swampy goo that bubbled and smelled of bitter green. “Sophia needs you as much as the bonfire line does.”
“I’ll go,” said Hal. “Someone has to pay for these people’s sins, and it might as well be me.”
The gunfire came again, closer and louder this time, so sharp that Annie couldn’t imagine the size of the gun or the force of the bullet. It was like listening to a thunderstorm somehow brought to heel and forced to fire at man’s whim. It was terrifying.
“Drink, dearest,” she urged Adeline.
The girl must have been feeling worse than she wanted to let on, because she nodded, hands cupped tight around the mug, and drank its contents without a gesture of protest. She coughed, once, the motion accompanied by the thick, gelatinous sound of things shifting deep inside her lungs. Then she lay back, snuggling down against her pillows, and closed her eyes.
Sophia stared. “She can sleep with this happening?” she demanded, sounding like she was on the border of hysteria.
“She hasn’t a choice when she’s just been given her medicine,” said Annie.
“Maybe I should take some of that,” said Sophia.
“It would kill you,” said Annie.
Sophia stared. “What?”
“Mugwort and mercury, silk from the terrantulas and threads of stinging nettle, and a dozen things more, all mixed together,” said Annie. She gingerly lifted Adeline’s abandoned cup and set it back on its shelf, where no one else would accidentally use it. “Ground ghost rock, for the main. It’s expensive, but necessary. My daughter has specific needs. Some of them are met by things that would be poison to anyone else.”
“My God,” breathed Soleil.
“I think we have well established that God has no place in Oregon,” said Annie coldly.
“No wonder the wolflings have no quarrel with her,” said Hal, and to that, Annie had no answer.
Martin nodded, face grim, and opened the wagon door, stepping foot outside. The night was quiet; the gunfire, loud as it was, was still infrequent. Enough so that it seemed perhaps it had been an error—some hunter, aiming for a fleeing stag, had aimed incorrectly, or some overexcited settler had opened fire on the bonfire without proper cause.
Then someone else screamed, the sound high and shrill and carrying, and the gunfire began anew. Martin leapt down from the wagon’s stairs and took off running. Hal was close behind him. Mr. Blackstone lingered long enough to turn to Annie, grabbing her forearms in his long-fingered hands.
“Stay here,” he commanded. There was no fury in his words: only fear, stripped naked and allowed into the open for all to see. “I’ve lost you once tonight. I think I would go mad with worry if I lost you a second time. Stay here, where you can be safe, and guard your daughter.”
“I will,” she promised.
He kissed her, and he was gone, running out the door after the others, vanishing into the night.
Annie hesitated, fingers going to her lips, before she took a cautious step toward the open door.
“No!” wailed Sophia. “He asked you to stay here, with us! Please stay here, with us! I’m hurt and my aunt is old—we cannot defend ourselves!”
“Hush,” whispered Annie, making a “settle” motion with her hands. “I’m going nowhere, but neither am I willing to lock myself in and make of us an easy target for the first fool who comes walking down the center of the boneyard. Stay where you are, stay quiet, and be still.”
Sophia quieted, clutching at Soleil’s hand so hard that it seemed she must break the other woman’s fingers. Soleil bore up silently, unflinching. She had been a seamstress for most of her life. Her hands were the tools of her trade, and while they might not be tender or quick anymore, they could handle any number of shocks.
Silently, Annie walked to the door and stuck her head outside. Mr. Blackstone and the others were already gone, vanishing into the barricade behind the bonfires. Someone fired a shotgun, the sound ringing through the circus. Whether it had been fired by their side or by the other was impossible to say.
There were lights on in The Clearing, bright and unyielding, chasing the shadows away. Men had lit lanterns, opened windows, doing their best to balance out the bonfires started by the circus folk. That, too, was to be expected.
Less expected were the lights around the valley’s rim, lights that matched the angle and progression of the winding road down into The Clearing. Annie counted five wagons, all of them lit up like fuel was no object, like they could afford to replace the sun if need be. The shape of them was … strange, boxy and familiar at the same time. She had seen these wagons before, or wagons very much like them. If only she could recall where, she was sure this would all start making sense. Every scrap of it, every bead of it would make sense.
A flash of light from the road punctuated another gunshot. Someone returned fire from the town line. The townsfolk and the circus people were shooting at a common enemy, she realized; someone was threatening them both. This might have started as a standoff between enemies, but it had grown into something larger and much more complicated.
Then the wagons on the roadway lit up.
She had thought them illuminated before, bedecked as they were with lanterns that must have been consuming oil and tallow at a prodigious rate. She had been right, in her way; she had also been terribly, horribly wrong. The new lights were clearly steam-powered, so bright and so clean that they were like looking at the sun, somehow taken captive and dragged down to the level of a mundane roadway. They were white and clinical, cold, and so unforgiving that they were somehow worse than the shadows, which fled before their onslaught.
Those few shadows that held fast, using some structure or person to anchor themselves, seemed to thicken in the instant that saw their fellows blown away. Annie felt them clutching at her ankles, clinging like living things. She kicked them off, and stared, the blood draining from her face, leaving her pale as paper and trembling. She did know those wagons, she did, and if there was any shame in that moment, it was that it had taken her so very long to recognize them for what they were, to understand what they meant.
It was all in the design. The filigree at their edges, the curve of their roofs, the sharp, austere elegance of their crafting. These were not workhorse wagons, like the ones the circus used, to be repaired by any tinker or wainwright to come along. No. These were show wagons, crafted to complement the households of the wealthy. Their backs bristled with steam tubes and clever attachments, all of them designed to propel the conveyances along the roads without the aid of animals or the fear of becoming mired in mud or untended trail. These wagons could roll across endless desert or through treacherous quicksand and never lose their footing or stall. They could traverse states in hours that would, for anyone else, have been days.
These wagons had been built in Deseret.
As if thinking the name of the land that had once been her home were some sort of summoning spell, cruelly cast and never intended for any loving world, a man emerged from one of the bright-lit wagons. He carried no gun. Instead, he held a long, conical tube, which he raised to his lips.
Annie was too far away to see his face, to see anything more than the slope of his shoulders and the length of his body. That was all she needed to see. She knew who it was before he spoke. After he spoke …
Had she ever needed to know what it felt like when the world fell down around her, she would have learned in that moment. She would have learned, and she would never have forgotten.
“My name is Dr. Michael Murphy,” said the man—said her husband—said the monster who had driven a good Deseret woman to steal her daughter and run away, across a continent, looking for a place where she could be safe. “I am not here to hurt you, although I will if you force my hand. I am looking for my wife. I am looking for Grace Murphy. She’s given you another name, which I will not speak, for she has no right to it, as I did not give it to her. She may have claimed to have the right to set her own course. She lied. She belongs to me.”
Annie whirled, running back to the wagon. Adeline was sleeping soundly. Sophia and Soleil were sitting on her bed, their hands still clutched together, like that alone was keeping them from flying off the face of the Earth.
“Stay where you are,” hissed Annie. “Close the windows. Open the door for no one, no matter how sweetly they ask. Protect my child.” She slammed the door, not waiting for them to reply, and turned, and ran for the wagon of oddities.
It was a strange place to seek refuge. It was full of monsters, creatures that would kill her as soon as look at her. With Tranquility gone, there was nothing there that would fight for her. She ran there all the same, fumbling with the lock, while the sound of gunfire spoke from the bonfire and her husband watched impatiently from above.
“All I am asking for is the woman,” he said, his voice magnified and bounced off every wall of the bowl surrounding The Clearing. “She is nothing to you. She is my wife, bound in the eyes of God to be my helpmeet on this Earth. She is my property, and you must return her to me.”
The wagon door was latched. Annie fumbled it open, tumbling head over heels in her haste to get inside. Her head cracked against the wagon floor, and she sprawled there for a moment, struggling to get her breath back.
In the nearest tank, the single pit wasp she had been able to keep alive after separation from its hive shifted, wings buzzing slightly, abdomen pulsing. Its stinger was wet, as always, shiny with the thin venom it secreted as easily as breathing. It would kill her if she gave it the opportunity. It would kill anyone if given the opportunity. Only Adeline had ever been able to come close to handling the thing, and even she could only interact with it safely when she was full of her medicine, when her blood reeked of mercury and ghost rock and silver. Any other time she came close, it would lash out, buzzing death behind a wall of glass.
It buzzed now, listless in the dark, a warning sound more than an actual threat. It had no desire to be forced into a fight, not before the sun was up.
Annie pushed herself onto her hands, fumbling at the lower shelves until she found her emergency lantern, the one she kept low, where Adeline could reach it. A few matches later and she was looking around the wagon, face lit by the lantern’s flickering light, searching for an answer to her dilemma—looking for a way out.
She had traveled the continent, collecting monsters everywhere she went, purchasing anything the natives called “unnatural” and locking it away, the way her husband had tried to lock away their daughter. She had allowed Adeline’s instincts to lead her to every terrible thing the West had to offer, and when she hadn’t been able to tame them, she had kept them anyway. She couldn’t aim a gun with more than the roughest accuracy. She couldn’t throw a knife or rope a steer. But oh, she could fill her hands with monsters, and she could use them, when no other weapons remained.
Oscar lurked at the bottom of his half-empty tank, turning in the shallow water to watch her with hopeful fishy eyes, waiting for his evening meal. The nibblers tracked her with even more intensity, their toothy jaws chewing at the water until thin lines of blood ran outward from their gums, coloring everything around them.
“You are terrible,” she informed them. “Of all the horrible things I’ve sheltered, you are the worst.”
The nibblers swam, all blind hunger and clashing jaws, and Annie knew what she had to do.
Opening the window at the far end of the wagon allowed her to clearly hear the gunfire and screaming from outside. Annie tried to shut it out as best she could, moving through the wagon, shifting exhibits from one place to another, struggling to do so without dropping anything. If she broke a jar …
Mr. Blackstone would care for Adeline, of that much she was sure. Assuming Michael didn’t burn this circus to the ground for the crime of sheltering her when she ran away from him.
The shots outside were getting more frequent, and closer. The screams were coming closer together. She didn’t recognize any of the screamers—all people sound essentially alike when in pain—but she could hear the pain in their voices, and she ached for them. This wasn’t their fault. None of this, from the beginning, had been their fault.
“It is not your fault!” declared Michael, his words eerily mirroring her thoughts. It made the skin on her arms rise in goosebumps, hairs standing on end. How dare he? She hadn’t seen him in the better part of a decade. He had no right to know her way of thinking. “My wife is a cunning temptress! She is skilled at lying to men, and she has tricked you! Only return her to me, and I promise you, all of this will go away!”
A confused murmur rose from the wagons around her. Annie realized two things in the same terrible moment. First, that much of the boneyard was undefended: the bonfire ring could keep some attackers away, but it would have holes, spans of unwatched ground. There were only so many bodies. There were only so many guns. Even if each able-bodied adult in the circus had gone to watch the border of the boneyard, there would still be places where a clever person could slip through.
They had thought themselves fighting against settlers and monsters, not madmen from Deseret, equipped with whatever new and terrible weapons had been devised in Hellstromme’s laboratory.
Second, and perhaps worse, was the realization that Michael had not yet told them who his wife was. The people around her, her friends and colleagues and companions on the road, they didn’t know Grace Murphy. They had never met Grace Murphy, because by the time she had reached them, she had already been calling herself by her daughters’ names, Annie in honor of lost Annabelle, Pearl in honor of the child she couldn’t save, with Adeline heavy in her arms and her sins weighing heavy on her heart. She was Annie Pearl to them, had always been Annie Pearl, and Michael might as well have been demanding they hand him the moon.
They weren’t leaving her to prepare for the onslaught because they believed in her ability to defend herself. They were doing it because they didn’t realize, yet, that she was the key to making this new problem go away. They let her work because they didn’t know they had an alternative.
Once they did know—and they would know; Michael would tell them, sooner or later, once he realized why no one was leaping to obey him—would they still be willing to protect her? Would she still be one of them, part of the family, once they understood what she’d done? That she was a fallen woman, unfaithful, a kidnapper and a deserter of children in the same action? She didn’t deserve this good place. She never had.
The door was heavy, designed to stay in place even when the wagon hit bad spots on the road. Annie put her shoulder to it, shoving it into the position she needed. She left it propped just enough to form an angle between itself and the frame. When she was sure that it was good, she grabbed a bucket and went back to work.
Outside, the gunfire, and Michael’s cold narration, went on.
“You may not know my wife by name. She may have lied to you. If that is the case, there is no need to feel ashamed, and I will not hold her deceit against you. She was always an excellent liar. A better liar than I had any idea. She may have given you a false name, a false history. She may have told you that she was the daughter of a robber baron or a banker, or the sister of some wanted criminal. But she is none of those things. She is Grace Murphy of Deseret, and she is my wife, and I would have her back again. Return her to me, or know that you have made an enemy.”
The night was loud enough to cover almost any sound. Annie was sure that the people who had come to The Clearing with Michael were counting on that. She knew her husband; knew how he thought and how he planned. A frontal assault, such as the one she could hear through the open window, was contrary to his nature. He wouldn’t want to endanger himself if there were any possible way to avoid it.
So: Assume that he had come to The Clearing expecting to find a sleepy little forest settlement, the sort of place that greeted visitors with open hands and open doors, putting up no resistance. The sort of place, more, where no one would hear the residents screaming if he allowed his goons to do what goons did best.
There was no way he was traveling without goons. Even if he had wanted to, Hellstromme would never have allowed it. In a way, Annie thought she had more in common with Hellstromme than she would ever have wanted to admit. They both kept dangerous pets. It was just that, in his case, the dangerous pets were human, while hers at least had the decency to reveal themselves openly as the monsters they were.
Moreover, there was no way Michael was here without Hellstromme’s blessing. Her husband never did anything without the full consent of the man he called master, the man who had lifted a brilliant but brittle boy out of the Holy City and elevated him to the position of scientist, untouchable, irrefutable. She knew little about her husband’s past, but she knew that he had no family; that his family name was, in fact, worth little to nothing in the temple, where bloodline and social position were everything. Their marriage had been predicated largely on what she brought to the table: her name, her position in society, and the legitimacy it endowed. Without her, he would have been nothing but another flunky as far as most of Deseret was concerned.
When Hellstromme told him to jump, he replied by asking how high he should aim. Hellstromme had approved this. Hellstromme had dispatched him, to bring back something he believed should be the property of Deseret.
Had Michael sent men to retrieve her, Annie would have had no trouble believing that she was the target. Now, however … he was calling her name, he was speaking of her betrayal, but he was doing it himself. Even her husband’s science couldn’t be so advanced as to allow him to duplicate himself so perfectly well. This was him. This was the man himself. And that meant that he had been sent to bring back something so precious that Hellstromme would risk his right-hand man for the sake of having it.
He was here for Adeline.
Annie moved the tank containing her largest, most aggressive snakes into position on the floor, feeling a strange serenity steal over her. There was nothing else that made sense. Michael was here to reclaim their daughter, whom he had always considered to be his property. Perhaps Annabelle had finally died, and he felt compelled to prove to Hellstromme that he could produce an heir. Perhaps Deseret was running low on the hearts of little girls. It didn’t matter. Michael was here for her daughter. Michael was here for her child.
Michael wasn’t going to have her.
Annie looked around the wagon, now reduced to a maze of dangers and potential booby-traps. Anyone who wasn’t her would have a hard time walking from one end to the other in full daylight without releasing an oddity and possibly killing themselves in the process. It wasn’t enough.
It would have to do.
Calmly, she hung her lantern in the window, marking the wagon as open, and occupied. Then she took a step back, until her calves hit the chair she kept for the long afternoons, when the sun was hot and the wagon was full, and it felt like she might die if she didn’t have the chance to sit down. She sat, spine as straight as it had been when she was a girl, learning the ways of etiquette and Deseret womanhood from the nursemaids and instructors her parents hired. She folded her hands in her lap, eyes fixed on the partially-open door.
Annie took a deep breath and settled in to wait for her husband’s people to come and try to take her home.